Annette King: Speech to Labour Party Conference

As I told you last year delegates, I have something in common with Hilary Clinton, I’m the same age!

Come Wednesday she will, hopefully, be the 45th President of the United States – their first woman president.

Come September next year (or there about), I will be proud to be the Deputy Leader when we win, and Andrew Little becomes the Prime Minister of New Zealand.

It is good to visit one of our great New Zealand cities, especially since my old mate Phil Goff has been elected Mayor. We sat beside each other for over 20 years.

Phil, our political equivalent to the Energizer bunny, I suspect has another 20 years of political energy left in him. So look out Auckland, you are in for a long ride!

I would like to congratulate and thank Andrew Kirton (our General Secretary who is doing a fantastic job), and his team for organising this conference.

A special thanks to Auckland Labour for your contribution. I know it’s involved long hours, hard work, and pretty lousy pay!

And thank you to all our delegates for not only turning up, but turning up to get stuck in.

It’s been a good Conference – hasn’t it? The vibe we had at last year’s conference in Palmerston North has followed us to this Centennial Conference in Auckland.

It’s been a Conference in the tradition of our Party.

Full of ideas, debate, argument (constructive of course!), policy, endless energy, raffles, and more raffles, and we even had fun!

Compare our Conference to National’s recent one – it was brought to you by the letter B – bland, boring, and full of blatherskite, and that was just Steven Joyce!

We are the Party of ideas, but we are not just about ideas, we are about making ideas happen.

You saw that yesterday when Grant Robertson, our outstanding Finance Spokesperson, released his report on the Future of Work – two years of work providing long-term solutions to long-term issues – a framework for decent work.